HP Integrity VM Accelerated Virtual I/O Overview

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HP Integrity VM Accelerated Virtual I/O (AVIO) Overview

Technical introduction

Abstract........................................................................................................................................3

Introduction ...................................................................................................................................3

Publication History ......................................................................................................................4

Benefits, Features, Limits, and Restrictions of AVIO ...............................................................................4

Introduction to the AVIO Storage and Networking Solutions...................................................................5

AVIO Products............................................................................................................................5

AVIO Overview..........................................................................................................................7

Emulated versus Accelerated Integrity VM Guest Drivers........................................................................8

Workload Implications for AVIO LAN...........................................................................................10

Workload Implications for AVIO Storage ......................................................................................10

Changes to Integrity VM Storage and Networking I/O Commands.......................................................11

Hpvmcreate / hpvmmodify......................................................................................................11

hpvmnet...............................................................................................................................11

Hpvmstatus...........................................................................................................................12

gvsdmgr (examples)...............................................................................................................13

Migrating from SCSI or LAN to AVIO...............................................................................................15

Migrating from SCSI HBAs to AVIO_STOR ....................................................................................15

Migrating from LAN NICs to AVIO_LAN.......................................................................................15

Migrating LAN NICs Consisting of Only AVIO Supported Device Types .............................................16

Migrating LAN NICs Containing AVIO Supported and Unsupported Backing Network Interfaces............16

AVIO Storage Integration with the HP-UX 11iv3 Next Generation Mass Storage Stack.............................16

Enhanced Data Integrity and Protection.........................................................................................16

Native Multi-pathing and Persistent DSFs.......................................................................................17

Dynamic detection of backing store attribute changes......................................................................17

Enhanced IO Retry and Error Policies............................................................................................17

Better Storage Error Reporting.....................................................................................................18

Better Storage Management and Diagnosability.............................................................................18

Support for LUNs greater than 2 TB in size....................................................................................18

Large Logical Volumes ...............................................................................................................18

Integrity VM 4.0 Storage Best Practices............................................................................................18

Summary of content (20 pages)

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HP Integrity VM Accelerated Virtual I/O (AVIO) Overview Technical introduction Abstract ........................................................................................................................................ 3 Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 3 Publication History .....................................................................................................................
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HP-UX 11iv3 guests ................................................................................................................... 18 Labeling Raw Disk Backing Stores................................................................................................ 18 Guest SCSI Queue Depth Tuning ................................................................................................. 19 Timing and Retry Policies......................................................................................
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Abstract This white paper discusses the Accelerated Virtual I/O (AVIO) solution, originally introduced with Integrity Virtual Machines (VM) Version 3.5 in December 2007and now supported on Integrity VM Version 4.0 as of September 2008. It is intended for system administrators who have experience with Integrity VM and manage storage or networking I/O devices in an Integrity VM environment. Introduction Integrity VM Version 3.
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migrate to AVIO. AVIO Storage Integration with the HP-UX 11iv3 Next Generation Mass Storage Stack Describes the benefits and features of AVIO storage integration with the Next Generation Mass Storage Stack. In addition, detailed tuning information will be described to provide better management and performance with Integrity VM 4.0 and AVIO Storage. Unless specifically noted, all of the information below applies to both Integrity VM 3.5 and 4.0.
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AVIO implements a larger queue depth compared to VIO. Queue depth can be tuned for AVIO devices in the guest as it is done for a native host to improve performance. • • HP-UX 11iv2 and 11iv3 Guest and Host Support - AVIO now supports both HP-UX 11iv2 and 11iv3 Guests and Hosts (see AVIO restrictions below). AVIO Storage backing store support. AVIO Storage now supports all disk backing stores (i.e. virtual disks, logical volumes, and files).
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Storage Bundle Name Storage Version Networking Bundle Name Networking Version Guest Components HP-UX 11iv2 HP-UX 11iv3 GuestAVIOStor GuestAVIOStor Host Components HP-UX 11iv2 HP-UX 11iv3 HostAVIOStor HostAvioStor B.11.23.0806 B.11.31.0809 B.11.23.0808 B.11.31.0809 GuestAvioLan GuestAvioLan HostAvioLan HostAvioLan B.11.23.0809 B.11.31.0809.01 B.11.23.0809 B.11.31.0809.
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AVIO Overview Figure 1 illustrates the two key components of both the Storage and Networking AVIO solution: Figure 1 AVIO High Level Overview I/O Stack Guest 1. AVIO Guest Drivers Virtual HBAs Monitor 2. Host AVIO Drivers Host I/O Stack Driver H/W Physical Hardware • AVIO Guest Drivers – There are new virtual adapters (HBAs) called avio_stor and avio_lan for AVIO storage and networking respectively with corresponding drivers.
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• o The host AVIO drivers also use guest isolation services provided by Integrity VM to validate guest addresses prior to forwarding onto the physical driver. This ensures that AVIO provides the same level of guest isolation as the current, fully-virtualized, SCSI and LAN solutions. o Further, attempts by the Guest to set MAC addresses that match the backing networking interface are prevented by the host AVIO LAN driver.
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Guest Monitor SCSI and LAN Stack Unmodified Guest Driver Device Emulation Host Protocol Driver SCSI and LAN Stack H/W Driver Physical Hardware There are three key items to note here: 1. Device Emulation – Because the guest driver is emulated, the Integrity VM monitor must trap and emulate any hardware level actions. In particular, initiating control and I/O requests require the monitor to trap, emulate and then forward the I/O request onto the host for processing. 2.
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• Lack of I/O performance limits the deployment of virtual machines. Now let’s look at the accelerated Integrity VM guest driver model. This is the model used by AVIO. Figure 1 illustrates the modified guest driver model for Integrity VM. There are three key points to note about this model: 1. No Device Emulation – Device emulation is no longer required. The AVIO guest driver model uses an Integrity VM-specific programming interface to initiate control and I/O requests. 2.
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between the guest and the host. These algorithms provide up to a 60% reduction in the CPU costs and up to 2X the I/O rate of the legacy SCSI driver in I/O intensive workloads. Several common applications such as file systems, mail and Oracle DBMS use either a 4KB or an 8KB IO size. For such workload, AVIO is expected to provide between twenty-five and fifty percent reduction in CPU utilization and between thirty-five and fifty percent improvement in throughput for I/O intensive workloads.
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Figure 3 hpvmnet –A example output Vswitch Name : vs_site Max Number of Ports : 100 Configured Ports : 2 Port Number : 1 Port State : Active Active VM : guest1 Untagged VlanId : none Reserved VMs : guest1 Adaptor : avio_lan Inbound Octets Inbound Unicast Pkts (wire) Inbound Unicast Pkts (local) Inbound Non-Unicast Pkts (wire) Inbound Non-Unicast Pkts (local) Inbound Discards Outbound Octets Outbound Unicast Pkts (wire) Outbound Unicast Pkts (local) Outbound Non-Unicast Pkts Outbound Discards Port Number :
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Figure 4 hpvmstatus –P example [Virtual Machine Details] Virtual Machine Name VM # OS Type State ==================== ===== ======= ======== Guest2 2 HPUX Off [Authorized Administrators] Oper Groups: Admin Groups: Oper Users: Admin Users: [Virtual CPU Details] #vCPUs Entitlement Maximum ====== =========== ======= 2 90.0% 100.
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to prevent data corruption, when the backing store corresponding to a guest LUN is replaced using hpvmmodify command while the guest is up and running. EXAMPLES (Using gvsdmgr.
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Migrating from SCSI or LAN to AVIO Migrating from SCSI HBAs to AVIO_STOR This section covers migrating existing SCSI HBAs to avio_stor. Note that the first release of the AVIO storage driver does not have support for all of the physical backing stores or guest device types supported by the virtual SCSI adapter.
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• A4929A and A4926A 1Gbps network interface cards Migrating LAN NICs Consisting of Only AVIO Supported Device Types The procedure mentioned in this section can be used to migrate lan NICs to avio_lan, if the virtual switch is exclusively configured with AVIO supported networking device types. Consult the latest HP Integrity Virtual Machines Installation, Configuration, and Administration manual at www.docs.hp.com for a complete list of supported AVIO backing network interfaces.
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feature helps to prevent the guest from corrupting a disk, if the replacement was not intentional. In order to validate the replacement, the guest administrator can use the replace_dsk functionality of gvsdmgr(1M) on 11iv2 Guests or the replace_wwid/replace_leg_dsf functionality of scsimgr(1M) on 11iv3 Guests. AVIO File backing stores commit the written data to the host disk before returning success to the guest.
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Better Storage Error Reporting HP-UX 11iv3 SCSI stack provides enhanced error information on IO failures such as media errors and deferred errors. Host AVIO propagates this information to the guest. For example, when an IO to the host backing store fails with deferred error, this error is propagated to the guest. Better Storage Management and Diagnosability The scsimgr utility in HP-UX 11iv3 Guests provides fine-grained management and tuning capabilities as well as enhanced diagnostics for storage devices.
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The label can be retrieved using: scsimgr get_devid -D /dev/rdisk/disk49 For example: scsimgr set_devid “guest_vme02” –D /dev/rdisk/disk49 sets the device identifier for disk49 to indicate it is part of guest vme02. Guest SCSI Queue Depth Tuning SCSI queue depth defines the maximum number of concurrent I/O requests that could be outstanding for a device. The default value is 8. To alter the value of scsi queue depth, change the “max_q_depth” attribute using scsimgr(1M).
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Command ioscan –N ioscan –m dsf ioscan –m lun ioscan –P health Description Displays the agile view of the I/O configuration Maps legacy DSFs to agile DSFs and vice versa Displays all the paths for a LUN Displays the health property of a LUN iofind io_redirect_dsf Utility to assist migration from legacy view to agile view Associates a new agile DSF with a set of legacy DSFs scsimgr get_info Display information about a controller, target path, LUN path or LUN Display statistics for a controller, target p